Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 311. Fragment Concerning an Appointment or an Illness [appointment]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P239018

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (1) [...] The 'strength' is over[turned ....] (2) [...] is atrophied. The base of the mid[dle] surface of the 'finger' [...]. (3) [The brea]st-bone is trimmed on the right and on the left. (r 1) There are [... unfavo]rable omens. (r 2) [The man whose name is written in this] tablet and [placed] before your [great] divinity [...] (Rest destroyed)

State Archives of Assyria, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).

Transliteration

[x x x x x] BE KALAG ⸢BAL?⸣ / [x x x x x] KAR SUḪUŠ EDIN U ⸢MURUB₄⸣ [x x x] / [BE GAG].⸢ZAG⸣.GA 15 u 150 / [o] ka-ṣiṣ / [x] ⸢TAG⸣-MEŠ ina ŠÀ-bi / [LÚ šá MU-šú ina] ni-ib-zi / [an-na-a šaṭ-ru]-ma ina IGI DINGIR-ti-ka / [GAL-ti GAR] ⸢x x⸣ [x x x]

Scholarly note

Extispicy query addressed to Šamaš, the sungod and patron of divination, edited by Ivan Starr (SAA 4, 1990). The king asks the deity to render a yes/no verdict on a political or military question. ORACC text P239018.

Attribution

Image: Adapted from Ivan Starr, Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria (State Archives of Assyria, 4), 1990. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2018, as part of the research programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich (Karen Radner, Humboldt Professorship 2015). The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P239018/..
Translation excerpted from Starr, I. 1990. Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria. SAA 4. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa04/P239018/.

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